#projectnovatorius — Public Fediverse posts

If you’re not using AI to write themed sea shanties for your nautical-themed company nomenclature, are you even a developer? That’s what the GitHub release box is for, right?

If you’re not using AI to write themed sea shanties for your nautical-themed company nomenclature, are you even a developer? That’s what the GitHub release box is for, right?

Today was mostly about tying up loose ends and making sure I’m ready for next week.

• Reviewed/organized client tickets and do some tree shaking
• Has discussions with contractors on my team about what they need
• Recorded source video for Gravity Forms/Siren introduction

Today was mostly about tying up loose ends and making sure I’m ready for next week.

• Reviewed/organized client tickets and do some tree shaking
• Has discussions with contractors on my team about what they need
• Recorded source video for Gravity Forms/Siren introduction

Pruning My Business Back to The Essentials

https://www.alexstandiford.com/articles/personal-updates/pruning-my-business-back-to-the-essentials/

Pruning My Business Back to The Essentials

https://www.alexstandiford.com/articles/personal-updates/pruning-my-business-back-to-the-essentials/

I’m doing a code audit on a new client who was unhappy with their previous agency. I find this when I crack open the theme. I’ve seen some weird stuff over the years, but this one is gonna keep me up at night 😱

I’m doing a code audit on a new client who was unhappy with their previous agency. I find this when I crack open the theme. I’ve seen some weird stuff over the years, but this one is gonna keep me up at night 😱

I’m doing a code audit on a new client who was unhappy with their previous agency. I find this when I crack open the theme. I’ve seen some weird stuff over the years, but this one is gonna keep me up at night 😱

I’m doing a code audit on a new client who was unhappy with their previous agency. I find this when I crack open the theme. I’ve seen some weird stuff over the years, but this one is gonna keep me up at night 😱

I’m doing a code audit on a new client who was unhappy with their previous agency. I find this when I crack open the theme. I’ve seen some weird stuff over the years, but this one is gonna keep me up at night 😱

I feel more like an archeologist. Most clients come to me after their site is built, and usually have had a change of hands happen 3-4 times unsuccessfully, and there’s a string of bad decisions made that piles up, and nobody knows where anything is. I change that.

I feel more like an archeologist. Most clients come to me after their site is built, and usually have had a change of hands happen 3-4 times unsuccessfully, and there’s a string of bad decisions made that piles up, and nobody knows where anything is. I change that.

I feel more like an archeologist. Most clients come to me after their site is built, and usually have had a change of hands happen 3-4 times unsuccessfully, and there’s a string of bad decisions made that piles up, and nobody knows where anything is. I change that.

I started using SupportCandy, hosting my support tickets on my own site instead of paying for a SaaS. It has some quirks in the ticket editing experience, but honestly for a $150 lifetime price right now it’s well worth it.

I started using SupportCandy, hosting my support tickets on my own site instead of paying for a SaaS. It has some quirks in the ticket editing experience, but honestly for a $150 lifetime price right now it’s well worth it.

Blazing through my backlog of support tickets today

Blazing through my backlog of support tickets today

The Trough of Despair

Besides, it’s really healthy to journal more-regularly. I’m already doing that in a private context, but I think it would be good to also share some of those moments on my blog. That’s the spirit of this damn thing, after all..

So, here’s to new habits. Or is it just old habits made new again. Or maybe it’s the habits we made along the way. Either way, let’s get caught up on the goings on for the past several months. Hopefully future updates won’t be so…broad, and I can hone-in on specific aspects a little closer moving forward.

The last personal update I published was in last December, and I talked a lot about re-acquainting with being a visionary in my business instead of the developer employee, and honestly that’s been the overall theme of this entire year. Over the last 6 months, Novatorius has committed thousands of lines of code for various clients, as well as updates to Siren.

Most of that code’s been written by others. What I write these days is mostly to make life easier for the team. Usually PHPNomad libraries.

But other than that, almost everything in my life lately has been all about leadership, team dynamics, organization and processes. There’s been a lot of professional growth for me in that regard, with Novatorius peaking out earlier this year during a busy time with about 15 people reporting to me, or reporting to someone on my team. Which, for me, that’s about 3 times the number of people I’ve ever managed on projects before, and it was a lot. So, since then, I’ve been focusing on leveling myself up to become better at communicating and leading people.

Unsurprisingly enough, that focus has paid off in dividends in areas I didn’t even realize needed improvement.

1. I’ve become much better at talking with friends, family, and my children.
2. I’ve found that my clients are generally happier, and I’m not over-promising.
3. I’ve learned to generally speak less. (lol that sounds so bad but stay with me)

Most of this has come from learning to listen, and leveraging better questions to prompt people to think for themselves, and allow me to either guide them to the best answer, or to gather more information before I suggest a solution.

I’ve been saying that I am becoming an actual problem solver instead of a solution creator. This has been one of the biggest changes for me, because my entire career I’ve been looked at as “the person with the answers”. It comes with the territory of being an engineer your entire adult life – you just assume that you’re the one who has to have an answer to every problem. That’s a hard habit to break.

Perhaps the most surprising thing is how much of these skills have allowed me to become a better coach for my children. I always thought I was pretty good at this, but I’ve been able to drastically improve this, and have been able to do better at asking more non-leading questions that get answers from my kids. For example, I’ve been able to much more-reliably meal prep during the week because I’ve stopped asking “what do you want to eat for dinner” and instead asking things like “what did you enjoy last week?” and “look at this cookbook and pick 5 things that look good for next week”.

The unfortunate consequence of all of this learning is that I utterly failed this Summer at forecasting my finances and my sales, and the result is that I have been dead ass broke for the last couple of months. I’m honestly in a respectably-sized hole right now, and I don’t love that.

I’m diggin’ my way out, and I have a pretty good-sized shovel, but needless to say I’m going to be doing a much better job of keeping my eyes on my sales process in the future because asking your parents for a loan so you can pay your bills is just not something anyone wants to do.

I don’t feel shame in this, necessarily, but it was a real wakeup call. I’m still a very small, fragile, business full of a few big rocks, and if any of them leave my jar I’m going to be hurting in a big way. Fortunately, I have the things in place to improve that, and have a path moving forward to ensure that we do better next year.

The simple reality is Summer is always slow in the agency world, and I need to expect that next year. The most-painful part is that we have absolutely made enough this year for me to not be in this position – I just didn’t forecast well-enough to realize that I needed to slow my roll.

So that’s where things stand now.

My biggest focus at the moment is playing the balancing act between balancing the demands of my high-touch clients that pays me now, with investing in processes and systems in my business to allow me to carve out some more time to work on the future growth of the business. It’s a ludicrously delicate balance, and the target moves from month-to-month, but the opportunity to make the transition is one of the biggest reasons why I left my job to work for myself in the first place, so I’m going to keep doing it in the meantime.

Overall this year has been a constant roller-coaster. Some days, I’m having nightmares that my kids won’t have anything under their Christmas tree. Other days I’m fulfilled, excited for the future, and jumping headlong into this journey. I’m mostly concerned about my mental health and maintaining my levels of burnout, which thankfully I have a few great systems in place to maintain that because otherwise I’d be totally fucked.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say this put a pretty big toll on my stress levels. It’s been a lot, and I wouldn’t exactly say I’ve been okay all the time. One of my dear friends, Chris Badgett of LifterLMS mentioned to me in a recent phone call that I’m in what he calls “The trough of despair” and I’ll tell ya what, it’s a pretty good articulation.

But in-spite of all of that, I’m still optimistic about where I am, where the business is heading, and where the coming months will take me. I’ve managed to assemble a small, focused team of people who are helping me grow the business, and fulfill the promises we make. We’re not exactly putting a dent in the earth right now, but we have dreams, a vision, and every week we’re rowing in the same direction more often than last week. That momentum is why we survived this past summer at all, and I believe that upward trajectory will continue in coming months.

Until then though, I’ll be celebrating the small wins with homemade cake.

The Trough of Despair

Besides, it’s really healthy to journal more-regularly. I’m already doing that in a private context, but I think it would be good to also share some of those moments on my blog. That’s the spirit of this damn thing, after all..

So, here’s to new habits. Or is it just old habits made new again. Or maybe it’s the habits we made along the way. Either way, let’s get caught up on the goings on for the past several months. Hopefully future updates won’t be so…broad, and I can hone-in on specific aspects a little closer moving forward.

The last personal update I published was in last December, and I talked a lot about re-acquainting with being a visionary in my business instead of the developer employee, and honestly that’s been the overall theme of this entire year. Over the last 6 months, Novatorius has committed thousands of lines of code for various clients, as well as updates to Siren.

Most of that code’s been written by others. What I write these days is mostly to make life easier for the team. Usually PHPNomad libraries.

But other than that, almost everything in my life lately has been all about leadership, team dynamics, organization and processes. There’s been a lot of professional growth for me in that regard, with Novatorius peaking out earlier this year during a busy time with about 15 people reporting to me, or reporting to someone on my team. Which, for me, that’s about 3 times the number of people I’ve ever managed on projects before, and it was a lot. So, since then, I’ve been focusing on leveling myself up to become better at communicating and leading people.

Unsurprisingly enough, that focus has paid off in dividends in areas I didn’t even realize needed improvement.

1. I’ve become much better at talking with friends, family, and my children.
2. I’ve found that my clients are generally happier, and I’m not over-promising.
3. I’ve learned to generally speak less. (lol that sounds so bad but stay with me)

Most of this has come from learning to listen, and leveraging better questions to prompt people to think for themselves, and allow me to either guide them to the best answer, or to gather more information before I suggest a solution.

I’ve been saying that I am becoming an actual problem solver instead of a solution creator. This has been one of the biggest changes for me, because my entire career I’ve been looked at as “the person with the answers”. It comes with the territory of being an engineer your entire adult life – you just assume that you’re the one who has to have an answer to every problem. That’s a hard habit to break.

Perhaps the most surprising thing is how much of these skills have allowed me to become a better coach for my children. I always thought I was pretty good at this, but I’ve been able to drastically improve this, and have been able to do better at asking more non-leading questions that get answers from my kids. For example, I’ve been able to much more-reliably meal prep during the week because I’ve stopped asking “what do you want to eat for dinner” and instead asking things like “what did you enjoy last week?” and “look at this cookbook and pick 5 things that look good for next week”.

The unfortunate consequence of all of this learning is that I utterly failed this Summer at forecasting my finances and my sales, and the result is that I have been dead ass broke for the last couple of months. I’m honestly in a respectably-sized hole right now, and I don’t love that.

I’m diggin’ my way out, and I have a pretty good-sized shovel, but needless to say I’m going to be doing a much better job of keeping my eyes on my sales process in the future because asking your parents for a loan so you can pay your bills is just not something anyone wants to do.

I don’t feel shame in this, necessarily, but it was a real wakeup call. I’m still a very small, fragile, business full of a few big rocks, and if any of them leave my jar I’m going to be hurting in a big way. Fortunately, I have the things in place to improve that, and have a path moving forward to ensure that we do better next year.

The simple reality is Summer is always slow in the agency world, and I need to expect that next year. The most-painful part is that we have absolutely made enough this year for me to not be in this position – I just didn’t forecast well-enough to realize that I needed to slow my roll.

So that’s where things stand now.

My biggest focus at the moment is playing the balancing act between balancing the demands of my high-touch clients that pays me now, with investing in processes and systems in my business to allow me to carve out some more time to work on the future growth of the business. It’s a ludicrously delicate balance, and the target moves from month-to-month, but the opportunity to make the transition is one of the biggest reasons why I left my job to work for myself in the first place, so I’m going to keep doing it in the meantime.

Overall this year has been a constant roller-coaster. Some days, I’m having nightmares that my kids won’t have anything under their Christmas tree. Other days I’m fulfilled, excited for the future, and jumping headlong into this journey. I’m mostly concerned about my mental health and maintaining my levels of burnout, which thankfully I have a few great systems in place to maintain that because otherwise I’d be totally fucked.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say this put a pretty big toll on my stress levels. It’s been a lot, and I wouldn’t exactly say I’ve been okay all the time. One of my dear friends, Chris Badgett of LifterLMS mentioned to me in a recent phone call that I’m in what he calls “The trough of despair” and I’ll tell ya what, it’s a pretty good articulation.

But in-spite of all of that, I’m still optimistic about where I am, where the business is heading, and where the coming months will take me. I’ve managed to assemble a small, focused team of people who are helping me grow the business, and fulfill the promises we make. We’re not exactly putting a dent in the earth right now, but we have dreams, a vision, and every week we’re rowing in the same direction more often than last week. That momentum is why we survived this past summer at all, and I believe that upward trajectory will continue in coming months.

Until then though, I’ll be celebrating the small wins with homemade cake.

Today’s list:

• Update plugins on a client site
• Onboard sales person
• Review pull requests
• Organize GitHub issues
• Schedule calls to onboard new client

Let’s GO

Today’s list:

• Update plugins on a client site
• Onboard sales person
• Review pull requests
• Organize GitHub issues
• Schedule calls to onboard new client

Let’s GO

Today:

• Prepare to onboard salesperson for tomorrow
• Set up kickoff meeting with newly signed client
• Prepare notes and agenda for the Q4 quarterly meeting
• Work on various support tickets for existing customers

Feeling like we’re at the tipping point this quarter. LFG

Today:

• Prepare to onboard salesperson for tomorrow
• Set up kickoff meeting with newly signed client
• Prepare notes and agenda for the Q4 quarterly meeting
• Work on various support tickets for existing customers

Feeling like we’re at the tipping point this quarter. LFG

Today:

• Prepare to onboard salesperson for tomorrow
• Set up kickoff meeting with newly signed client
• Prepare notes and agenda for the Q4 quarterly meeting
• Work on various support tickets for existing customers

Feeling like we’re at the tipping point this quarter. LFG

Today:

• Prepare to onboard salesperson for tomorrow
• Set up kickoff meeting with newly signed client
• Prepare notes and agenda for the Q4 quarterly meeting
• Work on various support tickets for existing customers

Feeling like we’re at the tipping point this quarter. LFG

The grind continues!

• Negotiating a scope item with a client.
• Setting up a deployment flow
• Troubleshooting a connection to a WordPress website to a custom Azure application
• Write up email for my email subscribers
• Get agenda together for quarterly meeting

The grind continues!

• Negotiating a scope item with a client.
• Setting up a deployment flow
• Troubleshooting a connection to a WordPress website to a custom Azure application
• Write up email for my email subscribers
• Get agenda together for quarterly meeting

Today’s a grindy, non-glorious day.

• Maintenance for one of our biggest clients.
• Quarterly meeting planning
• Posting social content
• Setting up account access for my assistant to manage our various subscriptions
• Sales emails and calls
• Interview for a salesperson

Today’s a grindy, non-glorious day.

• Maintenance for one of our biggest clients.
• Quarterly meeting planning
• Posting social content
• Setting up account access for my assistant to manage our various subscriptions
• Sales emails and calls
• Interview for a salesperson

Today in my “document all the things” binge, I’m documenting the recommended tooling and solutions we offer for slow websites, based on the result of a pingdom speed test. The hope is my team will be able to more-effectively recommend what I suggest to my clients.

Today in my “document all the things” binge, I’m documenting the recommended tooling and solutions we offer for slow websites, based on the result of a pingdom speed test. The hope is my team will be able to more-effectively recommend what I suggest to my clients.

Today in my “document all the things” binge, I’m documenting the recommended tooling and solutions we offer for slow websites, based on the result of a pingdom speed test. The hope is my team will be able to more-effectively recommend what I suggest to my clients.

Today in my “document all the things” binge, I’m documenting the recommended tooling and solutions we offer for slow websites, based on the result of a pingdom speed test. The hope is my team will be able to more-effectively recommend what I suggest to my clients.

Writing up some documents to help AI with advising my sales team on how to pitch Novatorius services to customers.

AI seems to be mostly shifting my time from doing the thing to documenting the thing. Which, I guess needed to happen if I want to grow regardless.

Writing up some documents to help AI with advising my sales team on how to pitch Novatorius services to customers.

AI seems to be mostly shifting my time from doing the thing to documenting the thing. Which, I guess needed to happen if I want to grow regardless.

Writing up some documents to help AI with advising my sales team on how to pitch Novatorius services to customers.

AI seems to be mostly shifting my time from doing the thing to documenting the thing. Which, I guess needed to happen if I want to grow regardless.

Writing up some documents to help AI with advising my sales team on how to pitch Novatorius services to customers.

AI seems to be mostly shifting my time from doing the thing to documenting the thing. Which, I guess needed to happen if I want to grow regardless.

Are you a Problem Solver, or Solution Creator?

https://www.alexstandiford.com/articles/essays/are-you-a-problem-solver-or-solution-creator/

Are you a Problem Solver, or Solution Creator?

https://www.alexstandiford.com/articles/essays/are-you-a-problem-solver-or-solution-creator/

Are you a Problem Solver, or Solution Creator?

There’s a big difference between being a problem solver and being a solution creator—and most people get it wrong.

https://www.alexstandiford.com/articles/essays/are-you-a-problem-solver-or-solution-creator/

Are you a Problem Solver, or Solution Creator?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how some people think they are problem solvers, but in reality they are solution creators.

It’s kind of subtle at first glance. They’re the same thing, right? right? In my experience, they’re definitely not.

There’s a world of difference between being a problem solver and being a solution creator. And one of those tends to lead to spinning wheels, wasted money, and a lot of frustration – especially in client work.

Not long ago, a client for my WordPress development agency came to me asking for “WooCommerce optimizations.” That was the phrase they used. They wanted help improving site performance, cleaning things up a bit, maybe making WooCommerce run faster or more efficiently. Totally reasonable request, and I think most people would’ve heard that and gone, “Great, let’s start optimizing WooCommerce.”

But that’s not how I approach things anymore. I’ve learned (honestly, the hard way) that most requests like that are surface-level. They’re symptoms. And if you dive in without slowing down to understand what’s underneath, you often end up doing a lot of work that doesn’t actually help. Or worse—you make the real problem even messier.

So instead of getting straight to work, I asked questions. I looked around. I poked at the edges of what they were saying to see what was really going on.

And what I found was…honestly kind of wild.

They had five separate vendors all touching the same site. One for design, one for development, one for support, one for marketing stuff, and another I couldn’t quite figure out. One key vendor was building custom plugins that were brittle, messy, and hard to maintain. Like, really hard to maintain. Every time something needed to be changed, it was a coin flip whether it would break something else. The whole thing felt like a fragile tower of duct tape and hope.

And, of course, that vendor would charge the client every time it would break, which became very costly, sometimes putting their site out of commission for several hours just from doing something as simple as updating plugins on their website.

So we got on a call with that vendor and started asking questions. Basic stuff about the system they built, just trying to understand the parts. How does the system authenticate, where are the bulk of your customizations, what causes these issues when updating, etc.

Their responses were…concerning. There was always a long pause between each question. The responses were always vague. The kept referring to “the original developer”, and at one point, when asked about a critical security concern, they said, “We’re not doing anything about that.”

That meeting cost the client $3,000.

And the vendor ended it by saying, “Great meeting, everyone!”

I just kind of sat there blinking at my screen. It was not a great meeting.

If I had just taken the original request at face value and started tweaking WooCommerce settings, I might’ve looked productive for a few weeks. I might’ve billed some hours, made some changes, and sent over a few reports. But it wouldn’t have solved anything. In fact, it probably would’ve made things worse, because we would’ve been building “solutions” on a completely unstable foundation. Solving problems that doesn’t actually solve their real problem.

Instead, we pulled back, and had some candid conversations with the client about what we saw. We took the time to explain their problems, and talked through a plan of action on how we could help them actually fix these problems.

The list of problems we suggested to fix had nothing to do with WooCommerce, but by proxy, they did help them make their website work much more reliably, and faster.

It’s just wild how easy it is to fall into “solution mode.” There’s a kind of rush that comes from doing something – especially when someone is paying you to do it. But more and more, I’m learning to slow down. To question the request. To sit with the problem a little longer than feels comfortable.

Because rushing to solve the wrong thing is a great way to waste everyone’s time.

So now, when someone asks for help, I try to make “problem solver” my default state. Not because it’s more noble or something. Just because it works better. I want to build things that last. I want to help people make real progress. And that means I can’t just react – I have to think.

I like to think that people hire me not because I can create solutions, but because I can solve problems. I can consult with the customer, look deep, and understand their real problem. From that, I can help them create a path to actually serving them in a meaningful way.

I’ve realized that, well, it’s freaking hard to correctly articulate a problem sometimes, and there’s a lot of value in spending the time to help a customer understand what they’re asking for in the first place. Sometimes that in itself is out of their reach.

It’s not always glamorous. It doesn’t always look impressive right away. But it gets better results. And it keeps me from spending weeks fixing things that didn’t need fixing in the first place.

There’s a few lessons in this story, I think:

1. If you’re asking someone for help, don’t prescribe a solution (like saying “I need WooCommerce optimizations”) instead, try to articulate the problem (“My website is unreliable”). This prompts your experts to think.
2. Pay attention to when someone prescribes a solution without any context to you, and seek out the context. Think about, and understand the problem deeply.

For example, my nephew messaged me a few days ago, asking for a saw. Now, my nephew has many great qualities, but he isn’t exactly known as a handyman.

Looking at the line of questioning, I opted to ask him for context. “Why do you need a saw?”

To which he explains that he has a couch that is completely water damaged in his basement from a recent flood, and he has no way to get it out without taking it apart.

I do have a saw, but I can tell you with confidence that my circular saw (or really, any saw for that matter) would probably just make a gigantic mess and not really help.

As it turns out, this isn’t my first water logged couch (long story), so I happened to know exactly how to break it apart. Crowbars, hammers, and a utility knife. Those were the right tools for this job.

Now, had I just blindly said “oh yeah I have a saw, sure here you go”, it would have without any doubt made the problem worse. Sawdust would get everywhere, we’d probably hit a nail and damage the blade, it might get caught in the fabric and do something unpredictable. Someone would probably get hurt, and the cutting probably wouldn’t even help break the couch down.

But by asking a follow-up question, I was able to save my nephew (and let’s be honest, myself) a lot of pain.

My customer asked for “WooCommerce optimizations” but what they needed was someone to take ownership of their site, and make it work reliably. That’s a much deeper need that took some effort to work out.

My nephew asked for a saw, but what he needed was assistance getting a couch out of a basement.

Ask questions. Think about the problem. Understand it fully. Even when you think you understand it, ask more questions. You may uncover a deeper problem still. Keep going until you’re confident you have everything you need. More context only makes you more capable of solving a problem.

Are you a Problem Solver, or Solution Creator?

There’s a big difference between being a problem solver and being a solution creator—and most people get it wrong.

https://www.alexstandiford.com/articles/essays/are-you-a-problem-solver-or-solution-creator/

Making My Business Siren-Centric

As I continue to re-acquaint myself with being a visionary, I find myself thinking a lot about how my business is running now, and where I want it to be. I have a vision of creating my business, Novatorius, to be a true celebration of remote work – empowering people to travel the world and accomplish true work life harmony. Needless to say, I have a ways to go – but I believe I’m in a great place to see this vision through.

And while I’ve been doing a lot better in setting up systems to actually run a proper agency, and in-general my company is running smoothly overall, I find myself thinking about my sales pipeline a lot. Because, honestly, the operations of my business is really only half of my big problems I had when I ran DesignFrame.

The other half of my problem was that my business income was not as predictable as I’d like it to be. I relied entirely too much on my network to bring me work, and as a result, I would end up taking whatever work would come my way because I never knew when it was going to dry up, and I’d end up in the famous freelancer feast or famine cycle that gets the best of us all, no matter how well-intended we may be.

I’ve been reflecting on this, and it has become more and more apparent to me that no matter how effective my business operations get, this approach creates a challenging dichotomy. Most people want to hire me when they find me through my network. I’m fairly active online. So there’s always at least a little friction that comes around when we start having discussions about working together, because most of my projects are implemented by a team of people who work with me.

To put it simply, I’m being treated like a freelancer – a resource – in a lot of these sales deals, and the simple fact is I’m not a freelancer.

So I find myself thinking more and more about how I can develop a better sales pipeline that:

1. Doesn’t rely on my personal network
2. Isn’t selling “me” specifically
3. Can lead people to other products and services I offer.
4. Supports my continual growth of Siren (which is why I quit my job in the first place!)

As I processed all of this…how unpredictable the input of my business is, I realized that the best thing I can do for it is to make that input more-predictable. If I can make my leads, and my projects more predictable, I can work around a lot of the limitations that makes running and growing Siren hard sometimes.

I spent some time thinking about all these one-off pipeline ideas – from doing marketing services, to website builds, plugin builds, and all of the other things I’ve done for clients in the past, and then it hit me.

The answer to all of this is Siren.

I’ve been spending my time thinking about how I could build a “side gig” that basically funds Siren and myself while Siren continues to grow, but it never occurred to me that there are entire product offerings and opportunities for my current Siren customers that falls in-line with the things my team is naturally good at doing.

I’ve been so focused on building all these separate pipelines, marketing funnels, and sales strategies, when what I should have been doing is simply expanding Siren’s pipeline. Expanding Siren’s sales strategies. Expanding offerings that flow through Siren.

It sounds so obvious now that I say it out loud – but the epiphany here is that instead of building Siren in-spite of my business, hoping that it someday can supplement or replace my need for project-based work – I’m shifting to build my business around Siren from day-one.

Things like:

1. Advising on building your first affiliate program
2. Building websites for existing Siren customers
3. Sponsored features for Siren
4. Siren program customizations
5. Marketing automation setups

The point is, I’m making Novatorius Siren-centric for the foreseeable future. All of my products and services will either lead people to Siren, or grow from Siren. Both the goal, and the input of my business all comes down to my plugin.

I sincerely believe this will help me grow my business, make it so that people don’t “hire me” specifically, and also utilize all the marketing and efforts I’m putting into Siren in a synergistic way.

Making My Business Siren-Centric

As I continue to re-acquaint myself with being a visionary, I find myself thinking a lot about how my business is running now, and where I want it to be. I have a vision of creating my business, Novatorius, to be a true celebration of remote work – empowering people to travel the world and accomplish true work life harmony. Needless to say, I have a ways to go – but I believe I’m in a great place to see this vision through.

And while I’ve been doing a lot better in setting up systems to actually run a proper agency, and in-general my company is running smoothly overall, I find myself thinking about my sales pipeline a lot. Because, honestly, the operations of my business is really only half of my big problems I had when I ran DesignFrame.

The other half of my problem was that my business income was not as predictable as I’d like it to be. I relied entirely too much on my network to bring me work, and as a result, I would end up taking whatever work would come my way because I never knew when it was going to dry up, and I’d end up in the famous freelancer feast or famine cycle that gets the best of us all, no matter how well-intended we may be.

I’ve been reflecting on this, and it has become more and more apparent to me that no matter how effective my business operations get, this approach creates a challenging dichotomy. Most people want to hire me when they find me through my network. I’m fairly active online. So there’s always at least a little friction that comes around when we start having discussions about working together, because most of my projects are implemented by a team of people who work with me.

To put it simply, I’m being treated like a freelancer – a resource – in a lot of these sales deals, and the simple fact is I’m not a freelancer.

So I find myself thinking more and more about how I can develop a better sales pipeline that:

1. Doesn’t rely on my personal network
2. Isn’t selling “me” specifically
3. Can lead people to other products and services I offer.
4. Supports my continual growth of Siren (which is why I quit my job in the first place!)

As I processed all of this…how unpredictable the input of my business is, I realized that the best thing I can do for it is to make that input more-predictable. If I can make my leads, and my projects more predictable, I can work around a lot of the limitations that makes running and growing Siren hard sometimes.

I spent some time thinking about all these one-off pipeline ideas – from doing marketing services, to website builds, plugin builds, and all of the other things I’ve done for clients in the past, and then it hit me.

The answer to all of this is Siren.

I’ve been spending my time thinking about how I could build a “side gig” that basically funds Siren and myself while Siren continues to grow, but it never occurred to me that there are entire product offerings and opportunities for my current Siren customers that falls in-line with the things my team is naturally good at doing.

I’ve been so focused on building all these separate pipelines, marketing funnels, and sales strategies, when what I should have been doing is simply expanding Siren’s pipeline. Expanding Siren’s sales strategies. Expanding offerings that flow through Siren.

It sounds so obvious now that I say it out loud – but the epiphany here is that instead of building Siren in-spite of my business, hoping that it someday can supplement or replace my need for project-based work – I’m shifting to build my business around Siren from day-one.

Things like:

1. Advising on building your first affiliate program
2. Building websites for existing Siren customers
3. Sponsored features for Siren
4. Siren program customizations
5. Marketing automation setups

The point is, I’m making Novatorius Siren-centric for the foreseeable future. All of my products and services will either lead people to Siren, or grow from Siren. Both the goal, and the input of my business all comes down to my plugin.

I sincerely believe this will help me grow my business, make it so that people don’t “hire me” specifically, and also utilize all the marketing and efforts I’m putting into Siren in a synergistic way.